Poet
Information on the life of Faḫr al-Dīn Asʿad “Faḫrī” Jurjānī is restricted to that which he tells us in his romantic epic Vīs va Rāmīn, completed ca. 447/1055. In the introduction to the poem, he praises the Seljuk Sulṭān Toğril Beg, his vizier, and the governor of Iṣfahān, who was the poet’s patron. Most importantly, however, Jurjānī recounts a conversation he had with the governor in which the governor asks the poet to retell, and perhaps poetically embellish, the love story of Vīs and Rāmīn, a tale preserved in Middle Persian. It is not clear, however, whether the story of Vīs and Rāmīn already existed in the form of a poem or if it was Jurjānī himself who was the first to poeticize it. Whatever the case may be, Jurjānī’s poetic version of Vīs va Rāmīn had a great influence on the formation of the style of the Persian romantic epic.